Boundary Crossing in Northern Ireland: The Curricular Potential of Use of History

• In Event: Historical Consciousness and Conflict: The Challenge of History Education in Diverse Democracies

Abstract

Northern Ireland provides a complex site for evaluating and extending Nordgren’s (2015) theoretical framework. No young person in Northern Ireland has to be taught that history has contemporary uses; they are literally surrounded by the use of historical representations to justify political positions, and they are well aware that history is used in this way (Barton & McCully, 2010). This awareness of partisan uses of history is due in part to the fact there is no dominant historical culture; or more accurately, there are two—Loyalist and Republican—each of which represents itself as being in the minority (Republicans within Northern Ireland, Loyalists within Ireland as a whole). The “cultural other” in this context, meanwhile, is not a distant and unknown entity, but a group with whom each side shares a variety of attributes—essentially everything except politics and religious denomination.
History education in Northern Ireland aims to provide students with a way of looking at history that differs from popular representations, one grounded in inquiry, multiple perspectives, and the examination of evidence—essentially, Nordgren’s idea of “history as sources from different cultures.” This is unlike “official” approaches to history in other countries, where a dominant narrative of the national past often is a mainstay of the subject. In Northern Ireland, it is impossible for schools to teach any single narrative, and instead they aim to reflect two differing perspectives on historical events. Just as students are aware that history outside schools serves partisan purposes, they recognize that school history is meant to provide an alternative to such popular uses, and they welcome this alternative—not as a challenge to their identities, but as a way of becoming more informed (Barton & McCully, 2010).
And yet by focusing on dichotomous experiences and identities, schools may fail to provide a full range of alternatives to community history, and may unwittingly reify the very polarizations that history education is meant to overcome. Rather than becoming more informed and aware, many students in Northern Ireland develop more fully articulated community identities as they draw selectively from the school curriculum to bolster their own developing sense of historical orientation; just as importantly, they fail to fully understand the other community’s perspective, despite its presence in the curriculum (Barton & McCully, 2005, 2012).
In order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the use of history, schools in Northern Ireland may need to 1) more directly confront students’ community-based ideas—in Nordgren’s terms, to explore “history as contemporary culture”; 2) address perspectives and experiences that do not so neatly fall into popular representations of the past—in Nordgren’s terms, to examine history as a “cultural system”; 3) to engage more fully the emotions and experiences of those from the other community—to focus on “history about cultural encounters” (McCully, 2009). Nordgren’s matrix, then, helps clarify part of the task of history education in Northern Ireland, while the complex reality of that setting helps elucidate how Nordgren’s categories can be given substance in specific contexts.

Authors

• Keith C. Barton, Indiana University

• Alan William McCully, Ulster University